India is losing its trees, animals and traditions, as it forgets its bond with nature.

Every day, as I left home and walked along the footpath near my house, battling cars that try to occupy it, I glanced irritatedly at the little mess of leftover rice-and-god-knows-what that I shuddered at and jumped over. I was delighted when the WhatsApp group of the local residents’ associations posted photos of the dirty patch I encountered and others like it. The unanimous decision: We will ask residents to stop creating this mess that attracts dogs and crows. Why, I mused, must people make this mess on our already crumbling footpaths?

I got my answer the next week, and it made me feel guilty, ashamed and ignorant. You see, the reason people from my neighbourhood’s last surviving little houses put the rice out was because they were acting on fading impulses and memories from a gentler and greener time – when nature was a part of daily life and Bengaluru was a city of trees and gardens big and small. “Bengaluru residents have not just been aware of the biodiversity of their gardens, but have made active efforts to support this biodiversity,” writes Harini Nagendra, a professor at Azim Premji University, in Nature in the City, her evocative exploration of the city’s natural history. “More than half of the residents engaged in practices such as placing a plate of warm rice (often with ghee [clarified butter] added outside the kitchen to feed crows, while they left water baths for birds in the summer, and sugar and milk for ants and reptiles.”

No smart cities without nature

Having experienced Bengaluru’s lush past since my family first came here 47 years ago and having lived through innumerable gardens that my father tended, I was aware of the broad brush strokes of the city’s changing history. But Nagendra’s book merges disparate brush strokes to paint a big picture of the ancient relationship between nature and a city of nine million that is now, simultaneously, the epitome of Indian metropolitan prosperity and chaos.

Nagendra’s book made me realise how far nature has receded from our lives. Butterflies, birds, reptiles and mammals are on their last legs in all of India’s cities. As they and the greenery that sustains them fades, it is important to realise that the smart-city era can never be realised without a sustaining natural environment. Indeed, the absence of nature is making our lives more unbearable. We may ignore the correlations and causations – or simply be ignorant, as many policy makers are – but scientists are clear about the devastating effects that the end of nature is having on India, within cities and without.

Nature’s diminishing effect is most obvious in physical terms: As trees, lakes and open spaces disappear and are replaced by closely spaced multi-storeyed buildings – increasingly violating zoning and setback laws – Indian cities are turning into “heat islands”, environment researcher Max Martin wrote in IndiaSpend in July 2016, after a review of scientific studies in five cities.

“Trees, shrubs, grass and soil absorb heat and cool the land, but since these are increasingly absent in Indian urban design, and what existed is being cleared, what’s left is concrete and asphalt, which soak in and intensify the day’s heat, staying hot for many hours at night,” wrote Martin. The result: warmer nights and hotter days in Delhi, Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Guwahati and Kochi, according to a number of independent studies that Martin reviewed. It goes without saying that roads and cities bereft of trees are hotter, more starved of water and ever more difficult to endure. And that, as science keeps reminding us, makes us stressed, angry and depressed.

India joins the sixth extinction

Outside the cities, India’s assault on nature has been more widely documented and reported: the loss of forests and wildlife and the effect this is having on a variety of things: monsoons, livelihoods and traditions. To be sure, the end of nature is not specific to India.

The world is facing the most widespread extinction since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years, warns the Living Planet Report, 2016, released last month by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London. “The evidence has never been stronger, and our understanding never been clearer,” wrote WWF director general Marco Lambertini. A variety of living creatures – mammals, reptiles, fish, amphibians – are disappearing at a rate 100 times faster than is normal. The number of vertebrate species fell 58% in just 42 years, and it is estimated that 66% of animals will be gone over the next four years. Worst hit are the world’s freshwater systems, which have lost 81% of their animals, which are indicators of the health of these systems. As these animals disappear, so does the freshwater, and that is why growing stresses and conflicts over such water supplies are skyrocketing.

There is no better place to realise the extent of those stresses than in Karnataka, where reservoirs in the lush southern territories – ironically called the Malnad (from male nadu or land of rain) – are almost empty. At a time when dams should have had plentiful water for farmers and electricity generation – thermal power plants should be powering down for maintenance – the unseasonal dryness has currently left the state with a dilemma: How will it implement Supreme Court orders to share water with its neighbours from its principal river, the Cauvery, and avoid widespread brownouts in the months to come?

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The Western Ghats’ blank spaces

Whether tensions with Tamil Nadu over the Cauvery or with Goa and Maharashtra over the Mahadayi (or Mandovi) in Karnataka’s north, the conflicts over the freshwater these rivers supply have the same point of origin: The Western Ghats, a 1,40,000 sq km swathe of damp forests and hills larger than Chhattisgarh, running from Gujarat to Kerala. It is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, a cradle of forests, animals and water, interlinked in a vast, intricate web of life. That web is being torn apart with unprecedented speed.

Over 90 years, the Western Ghats lost a third of its forests, according to this paper released in 2016 by scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation. The forest area lost is equivalent to nine times the size of Goa. Innumerable species have been lost, many before they were discovered. The Indian Space Research Organisation scientists recorded forest loss until 2013. Since then, more tracts of forest have been removed, particularly in the Cauvery basin. There are no official records of recent devastation, only the occasional newspaper report, such as the clearing of forests in the coffee-district of Kodagu for a power line in 2014, when estimates of trees felled ranged from 2,247 (the Power Grid Corporation) to 21,000 (the forest department) to 50,000 (trekkers, locals and activists).

As the forests of the Western Ghats are brought down, India loses its biotic capital, which is a national strategic reserve, as much as food stocks, gold and foreign-exchange holdings and the nuclear arsenal. The Ghats are – still – stuffed with undiscovered animals and plants, many hidden in the rain forests in the heart of the Ghats.

In his 1992 book, The Diversity of Life, the great US biologist Edward Wilson wrote of the unsolved mysteries of the rain forests:

“They are like unnamed islands hidden in the blank spaces of old maps; like dark shapes glimpsed descending the far wall of a reef into the abyss. They draw us forward... The unknown and prodigious are drugs to the scientific imagination, stirring insatiable hunger with a single taste. In our hearts we hope we will never discover everything.”

In our hearts, we know we never will discover everything in the Ghats – a place so rich that discoveries, sometimes, come at a rate of many species a night – not because of some romantic urge but because they are being slowly, quietly decimated. These forests are home to 1,500 species of flowering plants, 500 animals and an unknown number of fungi and insects found nowhere else on earth, but the interest generated by this biotic capital goes beyond beauty and wonder. The Western Ghats are a giant sponge, absorbing water as it falls, giving life not just to forests but sustaining peninsular India’s major rivers, the waters of which drain a fourth of India and give life to 245 million people across five states. That is more people than live in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

The most dire warning about the declining health of the Western Ghats came more than four years ago, when the Indian government banned the release of a report of a 325-page scientific study, Report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, and forbade its 14 authors, which included some of India’s best biologists and four government officers, from discussing it.

“Our nation is evidently at a crossroads today, with grave misgivings on continuing with business as usual,” said the report, which I quoted from when I wrote about it in 2012. Unlike many government-appointed committees, the authors – headed by the learned and eminent biologist Madhav Gadgil – took their job seriously, questioning the unscientific basis and practice of India’s environmental forest policies, introduced by the British 150 years ago, I wrote. The report offered two examples of how this system is manipulated: One, a fake claim in the 1970s made by India’s forestry establishment that 23% of the country was forest. A satellite scan ordered by the then secretary of the Space Department, Satish Dhawan, revealed India’s forests to be 14% of its area; the final figure was settled at 19%. Two, the paper tigers of Rajasthan’s Sariska Reserve, where officials fudged figures to show there were 17 tigers in 2004. There were none.

Since data are routinely falsified and short-term gains for governments and industries are now India’s chief environmental priority, it is no surprise that the remedial measures suggested for the Western Ghats will never be implemented.

The battle to join broken bonds

While many argue that the assault on nature is, well, natural given the living room that a country of 1.3 billion requires, this justification does not consider the long-term harm we cause to ourselves. “Faced with unprecedented growth, socio-cultural heterogeneity and inequity, we do not know what the future holds for nature in the new urban Indian,” writes Nagendra. “While the focus of the country appears to be on ‘smart cities’ as viewed through a technological lens, we need to understand that nature provides the most intelligent routes to a smart city.”

Back in Bengaluru, she sees hope in the “intense affinity” for nature that has survived the destruction, an affinity demonstrated in areas as diverse as slums, middle-class homes and wealthy apartment complexes. That affinity leads citizens of the city to come together and wage intense battles to save what is left and attempt to regenerate what has been lost. Now, more than ever, we need to recall our broken bonds with the natural world. Our future depends on it.

Adopting three simple habits can help maximise the benefits of existing sanitation infrastructure.

India’s sanitation problem is well documented – the country was recently declared as having the highest number of people living without basic sanitation facilities. Sanitation encompasses all conditions relating to public health - especially sewage disposal and access to clean drinking water. Due to associated losses in productivity caused by sickness, increased healthcare costs and increased mortality, India recorded a loss of 5.2% of its GDP to poor sanitation in 2015. As tremendous as the economic losses are, the on-ground, human consequences of poor sanitation are grim - about one in 10 deaths, according to the World Bank.

Poor sanitation contributes to about 10% of the world’s disease burden and is linked to even those diseases that may not present any correlation at first. For example, while lack of nutrition is a direct cause of anaemia, poor sanitation can contribute to the problem by causing intestinal diseases which prevent people from absorbing nutrition from their food. In fact, a study found a correlation between improved sanitation and reduced prevalence of anaemia in 14 Indian states. Diarrhoeal diseases, the most well-known consequence of poor sanitation, are the third largest cause of child mortality in India. They are also linked to undernutrition and stunting in children - 38% of Indian children exhibit stunted growth. Improved sanitation can also help reduce prevalence of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Though not a cause of high mortality rate, NTDs impair physical and cognitive development, contribute to mother and child illness and death and affect overall productivity. NTDs caused by parasitic worms - such as hookworms, whipworms etc. - infect millions every year and spread through open defecation. Improving toilet access and access to clean drinking water can significantly boost disease control programmes for diarrhoea, NTDs and other correlated conditions.

Unfortunately, with about 732 million people who have no access to toilets, India currently accounts for more than half of the world population that defecates in the open. India also accounts for the largest rural population living without access to clean water. Only 16% of India’s rural population is currently served by piped water.

However, there is cause for optimism. In the three years of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the country’s sanitation coverage has risen from 39% to 65% and eight states and Union Territories have been declared open defecation free. But lasting change cannot be ensured by the proliferation of sanitation infrastructure alone. Ensuring the usage of toilets is as important as building them, more so due to the cultural preference for open defecation in rural India.

According to the World Bank, hygiene promotion is essential to realise the potential of infrastructure investments in sanitation. Behavioural intervention is most successful when it targets few behaviours with the most potential for impact. An area of public health where behavioural training has made an impact is WASH - water, sanitation and hygiene - a key issue of UN Sustainable Development Goal 6. Compliance to WASH practices has the potential to reduce illness and death, poverty and improve overall socio-economic development. The UN has even marked observance days for each - World Water Day for water (22 March), World Toilet Day for sanitation (19 November) and Global Handwashing Day for hygiene (15 October).

At its simplest, the benefits of WASH can be availed through three simple habits that safeguard against disease - washing hands before eating, drinking clean water and using a clean toilet. Handwashing and use of toilets are some of the most important behavioural interventions that keep diarrhoeal diseases from spreading, while clean drinking water is essential to prevent water-borne diseases and adverse health effects of toxic contaminants. In India, Hindustan Unilever Limited launched the Swachh Aadat Swachh Bharat initiative, a WASH behaviour change programme, to complement the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Through its on-ground behaviour change model, SASB seeks to promote the three basic WASH habits to create long-lasting personal hygiene compliance among the populations it serves.

This touching film made as a part of SASB’s awareness campaign shows how lack of knowledge of basic hygiene practices means children miss out on developmental milestones due to preventable diseases.

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SASB created the Swachhata curriculum, a textbook to encourage adoption of personal hygiene among school going children. It makes use of conceptual learning to teach primary school students about cleanliness, germs and clean habits in an engaging manner. Swachh Basti is an extensive urban outreach programme for sensitising urban slum residents about WASH habits through demos, skits and etc. in partnership with key local stakeholders such as doctors, anganwadi workers and support groups. In Ghatkopar, Mumbai, HUL built the first-of-its-kind Suvidha Centre - an urban water, hygiene and sanitation community centre. It provides toilets, handwashing and shower facilities, safe drinking water and state-of-the-art laundry operations at an affordable cost to about 1,500 residents of the area.

HUL’s factory workers also act as Swachhata Doots, or messengers of change who teach the three habits of WASH in their own villages. This mobile-led rural behaviour change communication model also provides a volunteering opportunity to those who are busy but wish to make a difference. A toolkit especially designed for this purpose helps volunteers approach, explain and teach people in their immediate vicinity - their drivers, cooks, domestic helps etc. - about the three simple habits for better hygiene. This helps cast the net of awareness wider as regular interaction is conducive to habit formation. To learn more about their volunteering programme, click here. To learn more about the Swachh Aadat Swachh Bharat initiative, click here.

This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Hindustan Unilever and not by the Scroll editorial team.